Form following function

Squarespace 6 just added Typekit integration, which had been available in Squarespace 5. I had just assumed it would be in Squarespace 6 from the start, but when I relaunched my website on there I only found a selection of Google web fonts, so I just went with those though I still had a Typekit subscription active.

The Squarespace 6 Typekit integration includes 65 fonts, but my subscription gave me access to more of their catalog, so I went back to some typefaces I'd originally wanted to use here. For body text I'm using Chaparral by Carol Twombly, and for post titles I'm using FF Dax Compact Web Pro by Hans Reichel. You may or may not have noticed the update, but I'm happier with how these fonts render, especially on retina displays.

A long digression about my site layout. My previous blog design, from years ago, had a right gutter alongside the main column, and even further back, I had a right and left gutter. This time around, I chose a single column layout for several reasons. For one thing, I wanted to focus less on reblogging this time around and more on longer-form writing. Doing this just in my spare time, by myself, I can't produce enough content to support a multi-column, content-dense browse experience. Also, instinctually, this felt like the right form for the content I had bottled up in my head.

At Asymconf California recently, I heard Horace Dediu offer a fascinating explanation for why a clean single-column design might be evolutionarily soothing to humans (he wasn't arguing specifically for that design, but I'm going to selfishly appropriate his idea towards analyzing my site design). I can't remember where he himself heard the theory, but the idea is that because humans have both eyes in the front of their heads rather than on the sides, granting us binocular vision, we have the ability to focus our vision intently for long periods of time on a small area of our visual field. This, in addition to other developments like our brain size, may have uniquely enabled us to do things like read books or write code for hours on end.

One consequence of this positioning of our eyes, though, is that when we're reading, things in the periphery of our visual field are often read as threats or predators just based on evolutionary impulses. So a multi-column page layout, with colorful photos and ads to either or both sides of the content to be read, is constantly distracting us from the task at hand. It impedes deep focus.

That sounds crazy, I realize, and I'm no evolutionary biologist, but I do find it difficult to read content on so many sites on the web. That we even have services like Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket is comment enough on the subpar reading experience of the web.

Take your typical NYTimes article (I just grabbed the first one off of their homepage just now). Obviously they have many jobs they're trying to do on that page, but it is hard to just read the text top to bottom with any sense of peace when off to either side are persistent blocks of color and buttons and graphics, most of which have little to do with what you're reading. It's the tradeoff inherent to the business model and advertising formats they've chosen, and they are obviously far from the only site squeezed by the new economics of journalism in this age. The web is a wonder for all of its prodigious content, but there is a cost, and thus far we've paid for it with a largely distraction-filled substandard reading experience.

One other decision I've made based on the types of content I typically produce is to flatten the hierarchy of my blog, the primary page on my site, so that each post is displayed in full. With the frequency with which I post the types of long form content I post, a fully expanded single column of text felt most appropriate. It produces the feeling I want when reading content.

As for monetizing my blog, I will occasionally post affiliate links to Amazon for products I mention, but only if they're products I am discussing or endorsing. When I do, it will always be inline. If enough of you click and convert on those links to cover my site's hosting fees, and most years you do, it's a bonus. I'm not running this as a my sole means of supporting myself so that's all gravy.

One of the underrated aspects of Daring Fireball, one of the first sites I visit on the web each day, is its design. It also has a flat hierarchy, and its monochromatic design, minimal graphics, and single column layout makes for efficient and focused reading. Start at the top and read down until you come up against the last thing you read there. You're done. I always feel a sense of peaceful isolation with Gruber's thoughts.

Obviously some of that is a function of his prose style, which tends to be efficient, but the design is underrated. He also integrates much of his advertising inline with his posts so they don't stand out visually, with the exception of the one ad banner off to the left from The Deck (I wish it wasn't there, but it's a minor tradeoff for reading his content for free).

It's something akin to black and white photography. When I process a batch of photos from my SLR in Lightroom, one of the first decisions I make is whether to leave the photo in color or transform it into black and white. Often colors in a photo are just distraction, and what you want people to see is just structure. Black and white photography removes distractions and allows you to see the form of light and matter in the purest way.

Designing for text feels similar. For all that we do online, it's hard to beat the design of a physical book for presenting text in the most readable, comfortable, efficient layout. Kerning, line spacing, typeface selection, line length — printers have honed these to near perfection over centuries. We are still trying to find our way back.

A few Bulls links

You can take the boy out of Chicago, but...something like that. Out of the corner of my eye, I still follow the Bulls in the NBA. Sports team allegiances are irrational and silly, but they sure maximize one's emotional return from a sport.

Four recent Bulls links that caught my eye:

• Jalen Rose was rumored to have partied with some college students at the University of Indiana while there for ESPN's College Gameday, and one of the things he let slip while holding court was that he thought Michael Jordan was hungover and not sick with the flu in the famous flu game against the Jazz in the 1997 NBA Finals. Rose hinted as much on Bill Simmons podcast when asked about the flu game. In cryptic fashion, he implied what he was rumored to have said to those IU students.
• Nate Robinson has the highest PER on the Bulls this year. NATE ROBINSON. Defense has never been the Bulls issue under Thibodeau, it's good to see him recognize that at times he'll have to lose a bit on the defensive end to help the often stagnant offense.
• Zach Lowe, my favorite basketball analyst going right now, dissects how Chicago is winning this year despite missing Derrick Rose all season.
• Also from Zach Lowe, a profile of the Bulls' surprising breakout utility player Jimmy Butler, who has been receiving Twitter love from Bulls fan and former Senior Advisor to Barack Obama David Axelrod.

On the Jordan flu game, I have serious doubts as to Jalen Rose's claim that MJ was hung over. Granted, I'm biased. I watched the epic flu game from a hotel room in New York City where I was on a work assignment, and I can still recall jumping up and down and screaming on the hotel bed when Jordan hit that last 3-pointer and then collapsed into Scottie Pippen's arms.

I have no evidence one way or the other, but neither does Rose as far as I've read. My case goes like this. If Jordan was hungover, the team doctors would have given him an IV. I know enough doctors to have heard that if you're ever hungover and need to recover almost immediately, an IV will clean up your bloodstream with miraculous speed. Given the importance of that game, there's no way Jordan and the team doctors would have forgone so simple a remedy.

Secondly, it was widely reported that Jordan was ill two days before Game 5. According to multiple sources including this ESPN article, n the middle of the night two days before Game 5:

He remembers waking up in the middle of the night, sweating profusely, shaking, and feeling as if he was going to die. "I was scared; I didn't know what was happening to me," Michael Jordan would say.

At first, he thought it was a nightmare. Then he realized it was real, that he was seriously ill. "I felt partially paralyzed," he would later say.

When he lifted himself up from his bed in his Utah hotel room, his head began spinning. He'd never been so nauseated before. He feared that somehow, some way, someone had slipped some kind of drug in something he ate.

It was the middle of the night in Salt Lake City, an off day between Games 4 and 5. The series was tied, 2-2, following Utah's second consecutive win, but how in the world could Jordan play in this condition in Game 5?

Jordan called the Bulls' medical personnel, which came rushing to his room. They determined that he was suffering from food poisoning or an intestinal stomach virus. "There's no way you'll be able to play Game 5," Jordan was told.

Jordan remains in bed for the next 24 hours, missing the Bulls' morning practices the day before and the day of Game 5. He had lost several pounds. He was dehydrated. Then, at 3 p.m., just three hours before tip-off, Jordan rose from his hotel bed and dragged himself to the Delta Center.

Anyone can be hung over for one day, but two days in a row? For a partier of legendary endurance who knew he had a critical Game 5 coming up after the Jazz had just evened the series 2-2? The timeline doesn't make any sense.

Lastly, if you've watched the flu game, and I've seen it more times than is probably normal, Jordan's entire pallor looks ashen. I've never seen him look so ashen. I've nursed my share of drunks back to life in my day, and Jordan didn't look like he was hungover.

So not much that would hold up under a court of law, but I think the burden of proof is on Jalen Rose.

Soundtrack to our lives

This Adam Gopnik article about the quest to record and playback music in 3 dimensions  is behind the New Yorker paywall, but I wanted to excerpt this lovely passage:

The notion of a pure musical experience is, for Sterne and his cohorts, the last sad effort of a nineteenth-century cult of attention that placed the solitary alienated (and almost always male) listener in a temple of silence, the concert hall. Everyone faces forward, no one moves, applause is tightly regimented, and no one ever does the things that human beings normally do when they hear music: dance, move, act, eat, flirt. "It isn't strange that the MP3 generation walks around with earbuds on and listens to music while they're doing everything else," Sterne says. "That's the normal human condition of listening. It's very, very unusual to have any concept of music apart from a dance practice—the separation of music and dance is very late and highly unusual." The sociologists, his work suggests, are dissolving music back into the field of sound from which an act of Western will has divorced it.

Sterne's diagnosis of Choueiri and the other high-end researchers is that "they're trying to resolve the anxiety of the modern by reproducing the anxiety of the modern." He means that the anxiety that produced the isolated urban listener in the concert hall is only aggravated by the technology that, pretending to liberate listening from the concert space, simply makes for more lonely domestic concert halls. The sweet spot on the sofa is a sad place to be.

I felt chastened after reading this, given that I've spent the last year digitizing all my CD's in lossless codecs to play back through a high end DAC and high end speakers in my living room. I dislike the compressed, flattened sound of MP3s, and last year I reached a point where I couldn't listen to them anymore.

However, I do love the flexibility of having music with me on my iPhone, whether through a streaming service like Spotify or stored locally on the iPhone. I'm looking forward to iPhones and iPads with 128GB and more of storage capacity as I've taken to ripping my favorite music in Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) to play from an iPhone. The tricky thing is that to capitalize on the sound of those files, I have to send them to a portable amp and then into higher quality headphones. Out of the sheer inconvenience of such a setup, I usually just listen to music from Spotify or Rdio. Compressed audio formats like MP3 are one of the disruptions most pertinent to my life in the past 20 years.

Still, for music lovers, I recommend making an appointment at a high end audio store once in your life and bringing along your favorite CD, or asking them to supply some demo music. Last year I spent an hour in a converted classroom in the Easy Bay listening to some of my favorite CDs played through a high end audio system that finished in a pair of $80,000 Magico speakers.

The speakers were aptly named. For a moment, I forgot about the price tag and just listened to the music. It was magic.

Hit by a bus

This supercut of people in the movies wandering into traffic and getting hit by a bus is amusing, but it's always been one of my cinematic pet peeves.

The timing is never realistic: often the person is standing in the street for several seconds before the bus hits them, and to maintain the element of surprise, you never hear the squeal of brakes before impact. It's as if there are distracted bus drivers not looking where they're going driving all over the movie universe.

The shots telegraph themselves because of the way they're framed: head-on, parallel to the street, character centered and usually framed in a medium or wide shot from head to waist or head to toe. This is an odd framing because usually the character is consumed with great emotion at that moment (often rage) and so you'd expect to be in a close-up to amplify the emotional moment, the close-up being the shot size of greatest emotional intimacy (unless it's Les Miserables when the entire movie is an emotional peak). So the cut to a wide shot is signal for "we need to give more room on either side of the character to bring the bus in from the side in post-production."

But the worst problem is that "hit by a bus" accidents in the movies are generally used as a narrative deus ex machina. If you don't know how to organically advance the story, just have a character wander into the path of a negligent bus driver. Presto, instant plot advancement.

There are exceptions, of course, when the randomness of a bus accident is central to the theme of the movie. I won't name those movies here because simply seeing the movie title would be a spoiler given the subject of this post, but you'll know those when you see them because as an audience member you'll feel like the one who was hit by a bus out of nowhere and taken right out of the story and into the lap of a lazy screenwriter.

Bey

Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that's ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny's Child, the '90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she's ever done; every video of every show she's ever performed; every diary entry she's ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop. 

"Stop pretending that I have it all together," she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. "If I'm scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to 'Make Love to Me' and make love to my husband." 

Beyoncé's inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a "visual director" Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay's "Yellow" to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC's library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it'll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button. 

From a profile of Beyonce in the latest issue of GQ. This has to make Beyonce the world's most prominent lifelogger. Someone should try booking her for the next Quantified Self conference.

That revelation in the article is also a clue to the core of what her detractors have always found wanting. Namely, she feels more like a pristine construction of a pop icon than an actual flesh and blood human being.

The most entertaining of the Beyonce contrarians is Jay Caspian Kang of Grantland. In his counterpoint on Beyonce's widely lauded Super Bowl halftime performance, Kang writes:

The Super Bowl halftime show is ALWAYS huge and ridiculous, and although Beyoncé certainly took advantage of both the scale and the combustibility of the occasion, what did she really do other than give America a big-as-hell tour of why everyone loves Beyoncé? Maybe this is the point. But if all a musical act produces is evidence of her own popularity, she, by definition, has no soul. Her job, it seems, is to remind people that they should love her, but not to provide evidence as to why.

Not that she doesn't work extremely hard at it. Also from the GQ profile:

It stands to reason that when a girl owns her every likeness, as Beyoncé does, it can make her even more determined to be perfect. (Beyoncé isn't just selling Beyoncé's music, of course; she's selling her iconic stature: a careful melding of the aspirational and the unattainable.) So when she's on tour, every night she heads back to her hotel room with a DVD of the show she's just performed. Before going to sleep, she watches that show, critiquing herself, her dancers, her cameramen. The next morning, everyone receives pages of notes. 

It's enough to make Peyton Manning proud (Manning's legend being built in no small part on his habit for watching hours of game film like a conspiracy theorist poring over the Zapruder film).

Michael Jackson was a perfectionist, too, the footage from the documentary This Is It revealing a man who'd lost his God-given face but not his impossibly high standards for performance and showmanship. By then, however, he'd already survived many falls from grace that the scales of luck in the universe still felt balanced: the musical genius had come to us trapped in such a flawed human vessel.

Beyonce seems to have no flaws, or at least none that are perceivable by the human eye. Her Tumblr looks like a high end fashion catalog. The photos in her Instagram feed do not look like selfies snapped on the fly with an iPhone, they resemble photos shot by Italian fashion photographers named Massimo and curated by a team of Grace Coddington-esque editors.

She performs at Presidential Inaugurations, and when it was revealed she sang along to a pre-recorded track at the event this year, she had to restore order to the Force by singing the National Anthem a capella at her Super Bowl press conference, an entire gaggle of reporters holding up their cell phones to record some shaky footage like teenage girls at a Taylor Swift concert.

It doesn't hurt that she's married to perhaps the only other performer who could be her equal or superior in self-assurance. In late 2011 I went to the Watch the Throne concert in San Jose, a show remarkable for the sharp contrast between the personas of Jay-Z and Kanye. In his lyrics, in the subject matter of his music, one senses that Kanye's bravado comes from some deep sensitivity or insecurity. When he sings of heartbreak on 808's and Heartbreak, the emotions leak out of the containers he pours them into: auto-tuned melodies and rhymed lyrics.

[After his concert at Staples Center many years back, I was handed a small bound booklet on the way out. It was a long manifesto testifying to his own methods and greatness, but the words read like a plea for sympathy. I wish I still had that book.]

Jay-Z on stage was pure swagger. It didn't come from anywhere like Kanye's attitudes. It came from itself, like a self-referential loop. I'm not sure he's ever cried once in his entire life. If you were to take normal human confidence, then have Walter White work his magic in the lab to distill it into something even more pure and lethal, you'd get whatever it is that powers Mr. Carter (blue ivy meth?). His Twitter profile description consists of a single word: Genius. The way he carries himself on stage, the way he enunciates, the way his baseball cap sat on his head (comfortable rests the crown) — his poise was palpable.

Every girl I've spoken to who've seen him in concert has mentioned his charisma to me. On the ride back to San Francisco, Marie said it felt as if Jay-Z was letting us all know, "My seed is in Beyonce!" (she was pregnant at the time). I'm hesitant to read his memoir Decoded for fear it would dissipate some of the energy I feed on when I'm out running and one of his tracks comes piping through my earbuds.

And so they reign, modern royalty, hanging out with the Obama's one minute, courtside at a Nets game the next. Perhaps because Beyonce seems to have sprung into the world fully formed, perhaps because she makes even her high effort dancing seem effortless, her music feels emotionally opaque. She could sing of something more relatable, like heartbreak or addiction or poverty, but it wouldn't square with the images we see of her day to day life. Fair or not, we prefer our music about the underbelly of the American Dream to come from people who look like they might have some dirt under their fingernails.

The GQ profile ends thus:

"I now know that, yes, I am powerful," she says. "I'm more powerful than my mind can even digest and understand."

I'm not sure anyone else can either.